You probably have a few of us at your company right now. We fascinate most people because we have the ability to see things in a way. If I had to summarize what we do I’d say we’re really good at non-linear pattern recognition. We’re also very easily distracted, passionate and highly intelligent (if I do say so myself).

There’s a down side though.

We can tell you that something is going to be incredibly important but we usually can’t fully articulate why. We sometimes see patterns that we don’t understand but we know they’re important. Sometimes even when we can articulate why it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal to regular people.

We’re not always right. We see things so far out that sometimes things change. Sometimes we don’t know all the pieces of the patterns we see. And sometimes we’re just wrong.

We can be very distracting. Because we see non-linear patterns we sometimes talk and write in a non-linear fashion. (Want a good example of this read this Robert Scoble post. Is it about his son being diagnosed with Autism, his many visits with startups, the changes in mobile technology, his 10th year of blogging or what?) We are usually more interested in what needs to change than sticking around to help with the change. Even when we’re right and can articulate the coming changes there is often more opportunity than there are resources to address the opportunities.

So how do you get the most out of us?

Bring us in at the right stage: Geoffrey Moore of Crossing the Chasm fame wrote a follow up book a few years back called Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution. In it he calls out 4 quadrants and that each company and product progresses through during its life cycle. Early adopters are best at the first quadrant but need to learn to transition products into the second quadrant. From there find a new project for them to work on or you’ll quickly lose them.

Triangulate your input: You don’t need a lot of early adopters but you need more than one. You may even only employ one but you should have a few whose blogs you read or friends you can call to pick their brains. You need to be able to weed out the crazy ideas from the great ones.

Know your strategy: And of course I will tell you that this is the most important. There’s a lot of opportunity out there and you can’t chase it all. Make sure you know what you will do and what you won’t do. Make sure your early adopters know what your strategy is too. This helps them focus their efforts and helps them know what kind of feedback they need to bring to you and what they shouldn’t distract you with.

And to my early adopter friends I’d simply tell you:

• Be passionate but be patient. You’re early so there’s usually time.
• Learn to articulate your thoughts. Great ideas don’t mean crap if no one understands them.
• There’s more than one chance to get things right. If it doesn’t catch the first time, try and try again.

Photo credit by Venn Diagram

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Gnomedex with the lights off

Foleymo asked me why I was at Gnomedex and what I was passionate about. Guess what? The two overlapped.

And then Ken asked me about social media and particularly what small businesses could be doing to better leverage social media.

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But now I’m wondering what comes next (I always wonder this actually).

Two years ago this month we saw the market drop 777 points (and things only got worse from there). That was two years ago and I  believe that we have 5 more years of recession left. I don’t know if things will get worse before they get better (I hope not) but I do believe they won’t get better for another 5 years.

I’ve read a lot of reports lately about some perplexing trends in the economy.

Corporate profits are reaching pre-recession peaks

Tech layoffs are increasing

More jobs are being created but despite high unemployment there are no qualified applicants

Many people are flooding back to college, internships are getting more competitive and some fear an education bubble

I’m no economist and I don’t even pretend to be one but I’ve recently written two posts on the longer term affect these trends will have on a subset of the population that isn’t able to adjust to the massive changes we’ve experienced or are yet to come.

At the end of last year I made 5 predictions for the next 5 years in social media. My very first prediction was how the recession would fuel the growth of our industry (this is just an excerpt):

The Recovery Will Accelerate Social Media Investments-

The recession is not over, but it will feel like it’s over for most of us. The recession, however, will flatten out in most industries and begin to recover in several key industries. This will feel like a full recovery to most everyone. Everyone except those who still wont find jobs in 2010. A jobless recovery is not much of a recovery in my opinion.

But this partial recovery will dramatically accelerate social media investments. Those companies that spent a little will spend a lot and many who didn’t spend any will make at least small, if not dramatic, investments beginning in 2010. As the market truly recovers over the next 5 years the investments will grow dramatically. The disruption we’ve felt over the last 5 years will only be matched by the level of adoption we’ll see over the next 5.

I’ve thought a lot about what the next 5 years will look like and I am still going to do a lot more thinking. Here’s where I’m at today:

• Spending will continue to increase at year over year rate that will surprise all of us (I hesitate to say exponential but close to it).
• I think the job problem will not change anytime soon. Companies will try to automate and outsource more and more.
• This will lead to agencies doing more and more of the social media work for brands. Good for agencies bad for brands if not done transparently and strategically.
• To do this well I think we’ll see “Social Media Ambassadors” and more consultants embedded within brands.
• Interns will get a lot of experience running social media. This is great for them and bad for brands if they aren’t provided proper training and guidance.

What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Photo credit by Balakov

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Rewarding word-of-mouth is not a new tactic. But as I think more and more about being a woman and what it means to trust in the age of a social, real-time Web it really struck me yesterday: Brands want to pimp my trust.

As a woman in marketing, I am more critical about being marketed to because I get it. However, reflecting on recent stats from a Comscore report which found that women make up “just less than half of US internet users but make up a disproportionately large share of online buyers, at nearly 58%” I must admit that I am right in the 58%. And what are women buying? Apparel, accessories and jewelry.  Hmmm.

But how many of these women send out invitations to their friends to get a measly $10 credit to their accounts? And you probably wonder why am I so fixated on this? It’s one thing to do a product review out of self-motivation, or passion for the product. But once there is something beneficial inciting the action, is it still authentic?

In a recent Ad Age Insights white paper, titled, “The Reality of the Working Woman” the research breaks down what it means to be a female working professional across Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millenials in 2010.

The white paper quotes More magazine’s editor-in-chief Lesley Jane Seymour. “Women don’t just influence the buys—they control it,” she said. “The real revolution is what is happening to men. Women have taken over so much and gotten so far, they don’t know who they are anymore. It is going to be really interesting to watch what has happened to the millennial guys. What has the focus on girls and working women done to this generation of men?”

Wow, this is really a bold statement:  “we’ve gone so far that we don’t know who we are anymore.”  Are the exchanges that are happening between women online authentic? Do we know what we want? Regardless, we are all still shopping, something we’ve always been doing in the age of commercialism. And now as an increasing percent of the breadwinners, we have the buying power in many cases to expend on disposable items such as beauty and fashion. And frankly, men now play a different role in the lives of women given the autonomy that women increasingly possess.

So, what does this all mean? Be thoughtful about how your friends look to you as a trusted source – especially since the greatest commodity these days is time.

Just don’t pimp my trust, and as a marketer I won’t pimp yours. Look to engage with your fellow working women online in ways that support both of you. If you’re going to invite someone to benefit $10, do so in ways that really support the greater good. And that goes for men, too.

Photo credit by thorinside

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Following on my 10 Links post on the Future of Retail (yes I even used the same picture) I present to you 10 Links about the growing Mobile, Geolocation, Social Shopping, Coupon Craze.

My 10 Links posts don’t draw any conclusions for you but instead I try and share with you some of the roadsigns I’m seeing as I scan the path to the future.

Coupons aren’t anything new. Thanks to the recession they have found a new life in the social mobile world and startups in this space are raking in the VC money. I think there’s more hype than reality behind these services but then again, I’m not the target market.

1 ) Report: Gap Deal Causes 37% and 51% Traffic Increase For Groupon.com

It was hard to avoid the buzz on August 19th, when Groupon offered a national deal with The Gap which offered purchasers $50 in merchandise for $25, a 50% savings. Social Times’ analysis was that the promotion was a clear win for Groupon; assessing how well The Gap fared requires a more long-term view. Hot off the spreadsheets ofExperian Hitwise are some statistics that quantify some of the deal’s social media activity. After the jump, what we learned.

2 ) Dell Made $6.5m Using Twitter… But That Has Nothing To Do With Small Businesses

That would be roughly around $3.2m per year. Okay, so let’s suppose Dell made $3.2m using Twitter in 2009. Dell’s revenue in 2009 was 61 billion dollars. Conclusion: Revenue from Twitter was 0.01% from their total revenue ($3.2m is around 0.01% from $61 billion). “Hey small businesses, Dell made 0.01% of their revenue from Twitter. You can do the same!”

3 ) TIME’s 50 Best Websites 2010: Gowalla Picked over Foursquare?

Among today’s location-based networks, also often referred to as “check-in” services due to the way they allow users to register their arrival at a particular location, you’ll find some of the most innovative new ideas in mobile, if not in the entire tech industry itself.

Various experiments include everything from the addictive gameplay of Booyah’s MyTown to the mobile coupons of Shopkick to the more social Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, Loopt and others.

4 ) With Some Wind at Its Back, Loyalty Lab Looks for New Capital Infusion

Convincing online gamers to buy more hearts of romaine lettuce might sound like a tall order, but that’s what 7-year-old Loyalty Lab recently managed for client General Mills, through a partnership with social gaming giant Zynga.

How? By smacking “Free Farm Cash” stickers on participating packages of General Mill’s Green Giant Fresh produce — stickers that can be redeemed by Farmville users for five units of the game’s virtual cash currency.

5 ) Location Is the New Shopping Assistant

Point Inside, a Seattle, Wash.-based company that provides consumer location-based services, today announced a Find-It application specific to the Meijer retail chain. The software, for both Android and iOS handsets, uses Point Inside’s mapping solution to provide shoppers the instant location of any of the more than 100,000 items sold by Meijer. Currently in a pilot phase, the Find-It application is supported in four of Meijer’s 196 locations in the U.S.

6 ) GeoPosty: A WordPress plugin that lets your site serve location-aware content.

The idea behind GeoPosty is that it uses the Quova database of IP addresses to find the locality of your site’s visitors. Once that has been done, you can choose to have content appear to that visitor which is specific to them.

For instance, let’s say that you are an artisan bread maker. People visit your site from all around the world, but you also have a shop. GeoPosty makes it easy for you to offer coupons to your local customers, who are likely to use them in store, without compromising your site’s design for non-local users.

7 ) Implementing a Successful Coupon Strategy

Why have a coupon program? They started with coupons a year and a half ago and it went really well. They saw a lot of sales and inquiries. However, they saw their sales being dominated by coupons. To manage it, they became more exclusive with who they gave their coupons to.   In their paid search results they also had a ton of people using their brand. It dominated the SERPs. What was happening was that they were promoting old coupons.  By being more exclusive, again, helped them clean things up.

8 ) Who Wants Mobile Ads? Parents, Apparently

A new mobile marketing survey from Harris Interactive says that the demographic group most interested in receiving mobile advertising is mobile owners with children. This group is interested in receiving opt-in alerts from brands, says the study, and the adults in households with children are also generally more “promotionally active” than others, meaning more likely to take part in marketing promotions like couponing, discounts and daily deals

Those with children under 6-years old were the most receptive to this form of advertising, with 35% in favor of opt-in alerts that arrived via their mobile phone.

9 ) 7 Free Mobile Coupons and Shopping Apps

Technology is now available that displays store sales, steals-and-deals, rewards and money-saving mobile coupons directly to consumers’ wireless web-enabled devices. Mobile coupons are quickly becoming the way of the future.

10 ) Meijer’s mPerks Digital Coupon Program Marks Shift From Clipping Coupons To ‘Clicking’ Coupons

Citing convenience and savings, Meijer expects the new online tool to be highly popular with savvy shoppers and bargain-hungry customers.

Photo credit By Balakov

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Social media has made the big time. We’ve crossed the chasm, we’re mainstream, people are finally taking us seriously. We were right and they were wrong.

Maybe because it’s the end of summer. Maybe because I still haven’t fully recovered from Seattle Geek Week and Gnomedex. Either way I’m a little tired. Not physically tired but tired and a little bored. Part of it’s definitely the ADHD.

I still love this space. I love social media but it’s no longer revolutionary. It’s now evolutionary. Yes there are still parts of the world, industries and practices that still haven’t felt the full impact of the cultural revolution but it will happen. Just like sand castles on the beach they’ll all succumb to the tide. Eventually.

If you look around you’ll see the affects of Early Adopter Burn-Out. Some of them still believe but change their blog focus. Some of them all but quit blogging. Some of them radically change their career trajectory. You’ll see lots of job hopping and general a lot of restlessness.

I was talking with Jeremiah Owyang earlier this month and I asked him if he was seeing anything new or surprising in social media. I figured if anyone had, it would be him. He hadn’t.

Every trend, even really big ones like social media, hit  point where in order to be sustained the early adopters have to step out of the way and let people who don’t get easily distracted manage processes and create best practices. Things early adopters aren’t typically that good at.

So is this just a post about Tac whining (again) that things aren’t changing radically anymore? Am I quiting? No, far from it. Sure I’m venting a little but I wanted to get this off my chest so I could move on to the next phase.

You’ll notice that I’ve been posting less. The focus of my posts have shifted. But I’ll still be blogging regularly. You’ll probably see some new people posting here as well and in fact I still have an open invite for guest bloggers and contributors.

I’ll always post here about social media strategies and the future of business but you may see less posts about bright shiny objects and more posts about things like scaling a business, change management and larger socio-economic trends. That’s what I find interesting and how I spend most of my time on these days. Announcements about new “me too” features from Facebook or copycat startups aren’t that exciting. (Although I’m sure I’ll still find things I regularly geek out over and post those here as well.)

What about you? What do you find interesting these days? What are you bored with? What are you changing in your life if anything?

What would you like to see me post more or less about?

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To say that we live in a hyper connected World is a gross understatement. Some research suggests that instead of the 6 or 7 degrees of separation between everyone we have lived in, current research suggests that it may be as few as 3 or 4. But it’s nothing compared to how connected we will become. It’s not inconceivable that we will eventually be 1 degree separated from each other.

1 Computer Mediated Degree of separation.

I recently read a post on Slate talking about the last surviving member of a Brazilian indigenous tribe called The Most Isolated Man On the Planet.

He’s an Indian, and Brazilian officials have concluded that he’s the last survivor of an uncontacted tribe. They first became aware of his existence nearly 15 years ago and for a decade launched numerous expeditions to track him, to ensure his safety, and to try to establish peaceful contact with him. In 2007, with ranching and logging closing in quickly on all sides, government officials declared a 31-square-mile area around him off-limits to trespassing and development.

Can you imagine living 15 years of your life in complete isolation? Can you imagine going 15 minutes of your waking life without some sort of text, tweet, email, phone call, text or other communication?

And it’s only going to get worse. What will this increased hyper connectedness do to our society and even our psyche? We have no way of knowing but I do know something. Not everyone will be able to adjust to this change. Not everyone today can deal with the level of connectedness that we already have. Some people will build the (anti) digital equivalent of a 31-square-mile around themselves.

These are the Digital Agoraphobics.

The effects of our civilized society and the stress this causes to our body is already well documented. What kind of stress disorders will we develop when we are only 1 computer mediated degree of separation from every other person on the planet? When we moved from an agrarian culture to an enlightened World we created the asylum to handle people that didn’t fit into our enlightened World.

What will the Digital Asylum be?

And remember that 3-4 degrees of separation we live in or that 1 computer mediated degree of separation we will soon live in. That only applies to the percentage of population that’s connected. This isn’t just a problem for people who live in today’s 3rd World because a significant percentage of the 3rd World is already connected.

The Digitally Illiterate will make up the new Digital 3rd World.

This is a topic I am passionately curious about. I don’t have many answers. I don’t even think it’s something we can really do anything about. These things will happen. Call it social evolution. I just ask that we think about the Digital Disenfranchised as we race towards our digital future.

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Kristen Grant, on my team, pointed out one day that the overwhelming number of geolocation users are male. This is partly due to the geek, early adopter factor but it’s also due to those safety concerns. Some people are (not unjustly) uncomfortable with broadcasting where they are to the whole World. But this will change.

Charlene Li likes to point out the fears raised when caller ID first rolled out. It was perceived by many as an invasion of their privacy. That has flipped 180 degrees now. Do you answer blocked or unknown callers? I don’t.

It used to seem frivolous or even dangerous to give a teenager a cell phone. I freak out if my 12 year old daughter doesn’t have her cell phone on her.

This reminded me of something I heard about how African women use SMS as a form of rape prevention. They use SMS to tell their friends where they are and warn each other of where guerilla military and other threats are and to avoid those areas.

Eventually it will be perceived as safer to check in so people know where you are then it will to be “off the grid” where no one knows where you are. I can even see private/closed communities where the members check in knowing everyone in the group personally or has gone through a screening process to get in.

I’ve got safety on the brain because it’s GeekWeek here in Seattle and in addition to going to Gnomedex I’ll be attending PII 2010. Privacy Identity Innovation.

Among the topics discussed at PII:

Look for more posts this week from me along this topic.

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There’s a new revolution happening in conjunction with social media and that’s the rise of mobile. Mobile and social go hand in hand (no pun intended) but how marketers approach each couldn’t be more different.

Social media has been incredibly disruptive for marketers because no one is really sure where it belongs. Does the PR team drive it? Customer support? What about the digital team? There is no right answer here but you rarely here advertising brought into the conversation. Not that they don’t belong, they just haven’t done much yet. Although that is changing and thanks to the Old Spice guy we’ll see a lot more changes.

But now mobile is causing the same kind of disruption in marketing orgs and I hear similar battle’s going on. Does mobile marketing belong in advertising? Digital marketing? Interactive? But you don’t hear any mention of the relation based groups like PR or customer support.

The easy answer is that one’s an approach (social media/PR) and ones more of a platform (mobile/advertising).

I think that this is a mistake and PR people will soon be playing catch up to advertising if they don’t find a way to leverage mobile beyond just the social media applications.

Twitter and Foursquare do not a mobile strategy make.

This post was originally published on the Thinkers and Doers blog.

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Agencies that do product design and development, creative shops that do branding and advertising agencies are all feeling the coming storm of crowdsourcing. If they’re not then they have their heads buried in the sand. Why else do you think IDEO is taking a step into the game with OpenIDEO?

I’ve heard all the arguments about quality and professionalism and even the exploitation of creatives. I’d like to point out that these were all arguments that newspapers and every other business disrupted by the Internet has made before. So let’s stop whining about why the traditional model *should* survive and talk about how it’s going to get ripped apart.

Almost 3 years ago I wrote a little read post (my blog was still pretty new) about how to disrupt your business model using advertising. Having just read Clay Shirky’s new book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, I want us to look at crowdsourced disruption.

How could your business be crowdsourced? If your business is services based you’re the most at risk, if you’re actually producing something, you’re not as safe as you may think you are.

What do you need to effectively crowdsource today?

• First you need a motivator. Causes seem to work better than money but under the right circumstances money works too. The cause doesn’t have to be a “save the World” thing either.
• You need a website to aggregate and coordinate.
• You need willing participants with sufficient motivation. It doesn’t take as many people as you might think but you will need a strong core group.
• You need the job to be broken out into bite sized chunks.

It’s deceptively easy but it’s going to be hugely disruptive.

Photo credit By Sam Felder

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